by Ron Hansen
Was she aware of what had happened to Fräulein Raubal?
She said she’d been told she’d committed suicide.
“It’s sad, isn’t it,” Hess said. And then he saw old Frau Dachs standing at the kitchen door in a hairnet and quilted robe.
“I’m deaf but I felt it,” she said. “Around midnight. Windows shivering, and the whole flat shaking when she hit the floor.”
Hess turned to the old woman’s daughter. “Will you please see that she gets dressed and goes to a friend’s? We don’t want to further upset her.”
“Mutti,” Maria said. “Out.”
Hess hurried to Geli’s bedroom. She was lying facedown, with her legs folded off to the right as if she’d fallen from a kneel. She seemed to be fingering the confusion of her brown hair with her right hand, while her left arm was flat on the floor, as if straining for the Walther on the sofa. She was stiff with rigor mortis and the front of her dress was flooded in the darkening blood that widened out from the sofa to the four-poster bed. There were no shoe prints. A skeleton key was still inside the door, which was good. Walking down to Hitler’s bedroom, Hess got the skeleton key from his door, found out that it fitted Geli’s, and locked her door from the hallway.
Watching the Saturday traffic on Prinzregentenstrasse and sipping orange peel tea, the führer seemed fairly placid, but there was a shocking, crazed look to his eyes when Hess handed him the skeleton key. “Where are Schaub and Hoffmann?” Hess asked.
“Nürnberg,” the führer said. “The Deutscher Hof Hotel.”
“We’ll take you away,” Hess told him, “just as soon as the others arrive.”
One by one they were joined in the flat by Heinrich Himmler, Max Amann, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Baldur von Schirach. The führer was still not himself, so Himmler took him to his office in the party headquarters as the other gentlemen from the Brown House got together in the library to figure out a story.
Anni and Georg Winter and Anna Kirmair, the day maid, walked into the flat about fifteen minutes later, at nine, and found the four high-ranking Nazis in a heated argument. Georg asked Max Amann, “What’s happened?”
And he was told, “We haven’t decided yet.”
Within a few minutes they had decided, and Baldur von Schirach telephoned Adolf Dresler in the Brown House and extemporized a press release stating that Adolf Hitler had canceled his speech in Hamburg and was in deep mourning over the suicide of Angelika Raubal, his niece, who had been living in a furnished room in a building in Bogenhausen where Hitler owned a flat.
Meanwhile, Rudolf Hess was instructing the staff that a scandal would wreck the party, and if they had faith in Hitler, and hated Communists and Jews like he did, and hoped for a glorious Germany, free of want, they ought to put aside their niggling qualms and give the police analogous statements. Each agreed to do that, but they were schooled at some speed and their stories either did not match or matched so well they seemed memorized.
And then Amann handed Hess the telephone and he heard Himmler screaming that Göring, Goebbels, and he were in agreement that calling the unfortunate occurrence that befell Hitler’s niece a suicide might wreak nearly as much havoc for the party as calling it a murder. Would she, who knew her uncle so well, prefer to end it all? Wouldn’t the proximity of the führer make her happy and optimistic?
Schirach called Adolf Dresler again to change the press release to say that it was “a lamentable accident” and that she’d killed herself while handling the gun; but he was too late, the first press release had been issued. With regret Schirach told Hess that the story could not be changed and they discussed a suicide motive that would not involve the führer. She’d discovered, they decided, that she wasn’t a good enough singer. She was humiliated and ashamed.
Max Amann called the Deutscher Hof Hotel and was informed that the Hitler group had just checked out. A pageboy was sent in a taxi to flag them down.
Rudolf Hess handed Anni Winter the führer’s teacup and saucer for washing, then rushed down the hallway and rammed into Geli’s locked bedroom door, but it held fast. According to Ilse Hess, Georg Winter got a screwdriver and wedged it between the doorjamb and the lock as Hess flung himself at the door again. And this time it gave way, though he injured his right shoulder.
Franz Xaver Schwarz was a city councilor as well as the party treasurer, so it was he who was chosen to telephone the police and be in the flat when they came. Maria Reichert walked her mother down to the flat of friends on the first floor, so she was never questioned about September 18th though she’d been there the whole night.
And finally Heinrich Hoffmann called Rudolf Hess from the hotel in Nürnberg, about two hours to the north by car. Told of the murder, he was ordered to say Hitler had stayed with them in the hotel that night, and he and Schaub were to race back to München as if the führer were with them.
“And how is he?” Hoffmann asked.
“Stricken with grief, of course.”
“I mean really.”
“We’ll be fine,” Hess said, and hung up. He handed the telephone to Schwarz as he, Amann, and Schirach went to the Brown House for a conference with the führer.
Schwarz called Franz Gürtner, the Bavarian minister of justice who’d called the Nazis “flesh of our flesh,” and he also called Ernst Pöhner, a former police commissioner and a patriotic nationalist who’d persistently excused the violence of the SA so long as it was directed against Communists. Many things went unspoken.
Doktor Müller, the coroner, and two criminal police inspectors from the Polizeidirektion München arrived at the flat shortly after eleven that morning and were politely escorted to the crime scene by Schwarz, who claimed he’d been called to the flat by Maria Reichert just as soon as she’d seen the body.
There were no photographs taken. There was no autopsy. Kriminal Kommissar Forster wandered around the room, pursuing evidence, but only collected the Walther 6.35, the brass bullet casing, and Geli’s unfinished letter. Doktor Müller unfolded an oilcloth over the blood and crouched on it to examine the body, indicating to the police inspectors that the fatal shot had entered the female victim’s chest just above the heart, which it had missed, and had penetrated vertically through the left lung and kidney before halting, wide left of the spine, just above the pelvic girdle, where the bullet could be felt beneath the skin. There was some tattooing near the entrance wound, meaning the Walther had been fired from a few inches away. The signs of rigidity in her face, trunk, and extremities would seem to indicate that she’d died between four and forty hours earlier. Rigor mortis, he said, was too variable to provide greater accuracy about the time of death. While he found some purplish bruising on her neck and thighs, he felt that was just postmortem lividity. Doktor Müller thought the grayish discoloration of the skin was probably due to the fact that death was primarily consequent to suffocation following the shot in the lung. A few days later, when there was a further investigation, he seemed to recall an injury to the nose, but insisted it was flattened by lying face downward for many hours. On Saturday, Doktor Müller got up from beside Geli and snagged off his rubber gloves as he told the policemen, “Suicide or homicide. Who knows?”
Kriminal Kommissar Sauer asked his partner to hold the Walther in a way that would produce such a bullet trajectory, and he finally did by facing the ridge of the barrel and inserting his thumbs in the trigger guard while gripping the gun butt with his fingers. Sauer asked, “And how does that feel?”
“Clumsy,” Forster said.
“But it’s possible?”
“If she wanted to kill herself, why would she want to do it that way?”
Sauer and Forster went out to interview the household staff as Franz Xaver Schwarz silently watched. Georg Winter offered little, only saying that he’d forced open the door with a screwdriver “and found Raubal lying on the floor as a corpse. She’d shot herself. I can’t give any reason why she should have shot herself.”
Maria Reichert would later assert that she’d been i
n the flat when the shot was fired around eight in the evening, but she’d thought the noise had come from partygoers in the street. She’d also maintain that in the morning she’d called Schwarz and he in turn had called a locksmith named Hatzk to open the locked door. With Sauer, on Saturday, however, she got Hess’s instructions right, saying that soon after the spaghetti lunch, when the führer was gone, she’d heard a noise like a gunshot from Geli’s room, but thought the fräulein had taken a perfume bottle from the dresser and furiously smashed it to the floor. “She was a wild one,” she said. She hadn’t seen Geli after that. At nine on Saturday morning, she’d knocked on the door to wake Geli and, hearing no answer, had called for Anni Winter, who in turn had called her husband. Georg Winter had broken the door down, and she’d screamed when she’d seen the corpse. “I can’t explain why Raubal killed herself,” she said, adding, “She was very agitated recently.”
According to the police summary, Anni Winter testified that, “Raubal did not want to spend the weekend in Obersalzberg, as had been arranged, because she had no suitable dress to wear. She told me that her Uncle Adolf had refused to buy her a new dress, which also meant paying her fare to Wien, for she only bought her fancy clothes in Wien or Salzburg. But she did not seem unduly disappointed. Her moods changed so quickly. About three in the afternoon yesterday, I saw Raubal, very flustered, go into Hitler’s office and then hurry back into her own room. This seemed to me rather extraordinary. I now presume that she was fetching his pistol. At about nine this morning I was trying to take the newspaper into her room as I usually did, but I couldn’t get in, and no one answered when I knocked. I started to suspect that Raubal had been out overnight, but then realized the door was locked from the inside with the key stuck in it. I was present when my husband forced the door open. I don’t know why Raubal shot herself.”
Anna Kirmair only confirmed that the skeleton key was still in the door, which had been locked from the inside. “Why Raubal took her life, I don’t know.”
There would also be many and varying accounts of a savage argument between Hitler and his niece on the afternoon of September 18th—because she was pregnant with Adolf’s child, with the child of a pianist, she was jealous of Eva Braun, she had a Jewish lover in Linz, a Jewish lover in Wien, she wanted desperately to see her Aunt Paula—but those were fictions and phantoms calculated to create the impression of a dispirited and disintegrating young woman, and the sheer variety of the stories illustrated how little anyone believed them.
At two in the afternoon Maria Fischbauer, a paid preparer of corpses, got to the flat with a tin pail, hard bar soap, and a hand mitt. She washed Geli’s body without stripping off her clothes, and with the help of Anna Kirmair laid the body into a wooden coffin that three men from the East Cemetery had hauled up the stairs. And then they were permitted to quietly bear her away. Questioned later, Frau Fischbauer said, “Apart from the entry wound on the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I did not notice that the bridge of the nose was broken or that the nose was injured in any other way.”
Rosina Zweckl worked in the East Cemetery where she shifted Geli’s body to a finer zinc coffin furnished by the party. She said she’d carefully scrutinized the body because she’d heard the woman was Hitler’s niece. She’d been told she was a virgin—possibly to quell the gossip of a pregnancy. “She was very blue in the face,” Zweckl told investigators, but she could say little more. Then, as if prompted, she oddly paraphrased Maria Fischbauer, saying, “Apart from the entry wound in the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I saw nothing suspicious about the nose.”
Sauer went back to the flat on Prinzregentenplatz at half-past three, and found Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Hoffman there, as their friends had promised.
The photographer lit a cigarette in what he called the “coffee and cakes room,” off the foyer, and fell right into his Stammtisch role of garrulous storyteller, saying they’d left München around dinnertime on Friday, but that they were all tired and uneasy because of the Föhn, and so they’d journeyed only as far as Nürnberg before deciding to stay the night at the Deutscher Hof, the party’s hotel.
Sauer wrote that down. “All three of you registered there?”
“Well, just me. We shared the Hitler suite.”
“And what time was this?”
“About eight.”
Sauer asked him to please continue.
Well, they’d been heading north from Nürnberg this morning when Hitler had noticed the pageboy from the hotel waving for them to pull over. Hearing that Rudolf Hess urgently sought him, Hitler rushed back to the hotel, threw his dog whip and homburg on a lobby chair, and squeezed into a telephone booth. Hoffmann heard him say, “Hitler here. Has something happened?” And then in a hoarse voice he’d replied, “Oh God! How awful!” Hoffmann had been trying to put it together in his head, but had heard only, “Hess! Answer me—yes or no—is she alive or dead?”
The photographer lit another cigarette with the fire from the first and continued, “Afraid of Hitler’s legendary fury, Rudi naturally hung up. Who wouldn’t with such unhappy news? And Hitler headed toward the Mercedes, his hair awry over his forehead and a wild and glazed look in his face. ‘Something has happened to Geli,’ he said. And then he told Schaub to go back to München, shouting, ‘Get every ounce you can out of this car! I must see Geli alive again!’
“Hitler’s frenzy was contagious,” Hoffmann told Sauer. “With its accelerator jammed to the floorboards, the great car screamed its way back to München, but near Ebenhausen we were stopped for speeding by Hauptwachtmeister Probst.”
“We’ll check on that, of course,” Sauer said.
With self-satisfaction, Hoffmann said, “Schaub has the ticket to prove it. We were going twice the limit.”
“And you only heard the dread news when you got here?”
“Well, we went to the Brown House first. We heard then.”
“She was alive and well when you left on Friday?”
“Oh yes. She’d fondly kissed the leader good-bye.”
“Was she the suicidal type?”
The photographer slyly said, “The very reverse. Completely unhysterical. She had a carefree nature. She faced life with a fresh and healthy outlook. And that’s what makes it so puzzling to her friends that she should have felt impelled to take her own life.”
Sauer went to the office next to Geli’s bedroom to question Hitler, who was now in a gray suit and yellow tie with a gold swastika on the lapel. Sauer underestimated him. “Where are your homburg and dog whip?” he asked, as if he’d caught him out.
Unflustered, Hitler tilted back in his office chair and said, “I have a change of clothes at party headquarters. The tragedy put me in a foul sweat, and I did not wish to offend.”
“A tragedy? I just heard you thought your niece was still alive.”
“Oh, deep down one knows these things, even while hoping otherwise. We were quite fond of each other.”
“Were you told how she died?”
With stunning aplomb he said, “She wrapped my Walther in a facecloth to muffle the explosion. And then she fired into her mouth.”
Sauer stared at him, but Hitler offered nothing more. “Tell me about her.”
“She was born in Linz, Austria. She was the daughter of my half-sister. She was twenty-three years old.” And there, too, he halted, as if that were enough—he who was known for hour-long monologues.
“And?” Sauer asked.
Worrying his forehead with his hand in his sadness, he sighed and said, “My niece had been a medical student at the university, but she hadn’t taken to it. She therefore turned to singing lessons. She was soon to make her operatic debut, but she didn’t feel quite ready and beseeched me for further lessons from a Professor Otto Ro in Wien. Quite naturally, as her male guardian, I was concerned that she would be defiled by wild and unsavory influences in that sink of iniquity, and I agreed to the journey only on the condition that her mother, now in Obe
rsalzberg, went with her. Geli did not, for some reason, choose to oblige me, and I declared myself to be quite against the plan. She may well have been annoyed about that, but she did not seem particularly upset, and she’d taken leave of me quite calmly when I left for Hamburg on Friday afternoon.”
“At what hour?”
“Around three.”
“And you went less than one third of the way?”
“We had plenty of time. My speech was to have been at eight o’clock this evening.”
“Are you aware of anything that may have driven your niece to suicide?”
“She may have felt she’d disappointed me. She’d begged for singing lessons, and out of generosity I’d paid for them, but she was discovering she was not talented enough. To be frank, I think she was frightened of going onstage. Or there may have been a conflict over love. One hears so many rumors. And yet as her uncle I felt constrained by propriety from a natural curiosity about my niece’s private affairs. In fact, I was forced to be rather more aloof than I wished, and I was not always privy to intimate details of her life.”
“Anything else?”
Scanning the gray skies through his office window, Hitler sucked thoughtfully on his right little finger and said, “It occurs to me now that she’d once taken part in a séance where tables moved and there she’d been told she certainly wouldn’t die a natural death. And she was always afraid of guns, possibly out of foreboding.”
Sauer asked, “She knew where your pistol was kept?”
“Oh yes.” And then he held his famous mesmerizing stare on Sauer, a film of tears welling up on cue. “You must understand Geli’s death has affected me very deeply. She was the only relation with whom I was ever close. We were inseparable. And now this has to happen to me.”
Frau Angela Raubal was summoned from Obersalzberg on Saturday and her train was met by Rudolf Hess, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Anni Winter. She fainted when she viewed Geli’s body in the East Cemetery. When she awoke she was in a parlor and Rudolf Hess was watching her with overdone worry and sympathy. She was told that the police and the coroner had just completed their investigation. All agreed that it had been a suicide, so Angelika Raubal, medical student, was listed as number 193 in the München Selbstmörder register for 1931. Angela was not told that a public prosecutor named Gläser had been offended by the hastiness of the judgment and had urged a further inquest, but he had been overruled by Franz Gürtner, who would become Reich minister of justice when Adolf Hitler came to power.